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New bird flu outbreak affects China, Indonesia and Vietnam
Bird flu has infected a farmer in China's first human case in months, killed an Indonesian teenager and spread deeper in Vietnam in a flare-up of infections mirroring past winters.
- Reuters
- Published: 23:36 May 3, 2009
Beijing: Bird flu has infected a farmer in China's first human case in months, killed an Indonesian teenager and spread deeper in Vietnam in a flare-up of infections mirroring past winters.
A second Indonesian bird flu victim, a 37-year-old woman from Banten Province on Java island, was in hospital yesterday, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said.
Most human victims of bird flu have contracted the virus from infected birds, usually chickens, ducks or geese and there is usually a surge in cases during cooler months when the virus seems to thrive.
The 37-year-old Chinese man from the eastern province of Anhui kept backyard birds, but as in other human bird flu cases in China there was no reported poultry outbreak in the area, raising questions as to how he contracted the virus. The man developed symptoms of fever and pneumonia early last month and was discharged from hospital on Saturday, the state-run Health News said.
"In China, the challenge is now to identify where this virus is hiding and how it is circulating," Henk Bekedam, the WHO's China representative, told Reuters.
China has reported 22 human cases, including 14 deaths, since 2003 and, with the world's largest poultry population and millions of backyard birds roaming free, it is seen as a centre in the fight against the virus.
Bekedam said that as vaccination rates for birds improve in China, detecting avian influenza becomes harder and harder, offering a possible explanation for why there was no reported outbreak where the farmer lived.
Indonesia has the highest human death toll from bird flu of any nation, and on Wednesday that number grew to 58 when a boy, from Tangerang near Jakarta, died, said the head of the Indonesian health ministry's bird flu centre Runizar Ruesin.
The boy was admitted to hospital in the capital last week and deaths among poultry in his neighbourhood had recently been reported, the WHO said in a statement posted on its website. Muhammad Nadirin, another official at the country's bird flu centre, said hospital staff had to take extra care washing the boy's corpse because of concerns the virus might infect them.
"He was washed using special protection methods to prevent contagion," but added he didn't know if it could be transmitted from human-to-human this way.
In Vietnam, bird flu has been confirmed in a fourth Vietnamese province after tests on 70 ducks showed they had died from the H5N1 virus, a government report said yesterday.
The results of tests on ducks found dead at the weekend prompted health workers to slaughter around 1,800 more ducks in two communes of Kien Giang province.
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